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Exporting observation logs from LiveSky to Excel

OK I have about 4 years worth of observations recorded over the various editions of Sky Safari. Now that I have Live Sky I want to export them to an excel spreadsheet for a permanent record. I find that if I export a recent .csv observation list I get an excel sheet that has all the fields (we'll get back to Julian date in a moment). However when I go to profile and export ALL my observations, my date and equipment listings appear confused/corrupt? My older observations have "seeing" and "transparency" in the same column as "date" while "equipment" pops up as a new column and not in line the column referenced using my newer observations. Is this because of the different editions of sky safari? Is it possible to redo old observations and reenter to try to bring some consistency?

With regard to dates being in Julain Dates. I find this very difficult to use and converting these in excel seems somewhat less than straight forward. Since I was recording my observations in normal calendar info is there no way to simply ask for that as the default? I do not wish to be an excel wizard just to capture and archive my readings...

Thanks

 

6 comments

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    Chris

    Agreed that Julian dates are annoying. Here's the excel conversion:

    =(A2-2415018.5)-5/24 - DST

    =(A2-2415018.5)-6/24 - NOT DST

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    Chris Lee

    Thanks - saw this on a previous answer but frankly I don't understand it - not being an expert in excel. When I ignore the DST (Daylight Saving Time I assume?) I get numbers back such as "40000". I do not know how to convert these numbers to dates.

    I do not know what the DST / NOT DST refers to as an entry for an excel formula. Am I supposed to manually look through the record and remember when DST starts and ends and then make corrections to the times from the main formula?

    I guess I can spend the next hours on google but if you can explain further I would appreciate it... When I type in DST into the excel formula sheet the system thinks I seek a DSTDEV function etc...

    Anyway thanks for the quick response.

    EDIT: OK now taught myself about "DATEVALUE" and "TEXT" but would still like to understand about DST - is this something I must adjust or is there a function?

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    Chris

    So when I make my personal backups each session, or each month or two, I just know if it's DST or not and use the appropriate formula. After you make the conversion, you'll have to right click and go to format and choose the date format you like.

    As for going back in time, you'll probably have to go through the file and use the correct formula for ranges of cells, or just choose the DST formula and let all the others be off by 1 hour. When using these formulas you won't want to leave the - DST or - Not DST, as excel won't recognize that.

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    Chris Lee

    Thanks Chris - once more I struggle trying to figure out how to extract the time (rather than the date) from the Julian values? Have converted your formula via TEXT (A2, "YYYY-MM-DD") but seem to have issues taking extra steps for the actual time of the observations... Duh!! Back to Google...

    EDIT: OK so now aware of the TIME function (jeez!) and also it seems the 5/24 was to do with offset from GMT which explains why my London times were all crazy... 

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    Chris

    Try doing a copy > paste values. Then, depending on what you choose for date format, you can get date and times showing up. If you need times in a separate cell, there are a few ways to do that, let me know if you need help with that.

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    Chris Lee

    Thanks Chris - just updated my last entry... 

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